City Cats Might Not Be the Rat-Control Option We Thought They Were

Author: Matthew Taub / Source: Atlas Obscura

The ability to hunt, kill, and eat rodents is a permanent part of the cat brand, right alongside aloofness and scratching up the couch.

Not so fast, says a team of researchers with a new study out today in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, which provides rare insight into the cat-rat dynamic in an urban environment.

The team, led by Michael H. Parsons of Fordham University, has found that feral cats (Felis catus) are seemingly ineffective predators of city rats (Rattus spp.), despite the cats’ reputation as urban rat-control agents. The team studied a rat colony living in a waste management facility in Atlas Obscura’s own Greenpoint, Brooklyn, over a period of five months, between December 2017 and May 2018. In that time, the surrounding feral cats landed just three confirmed kills.

That’s not what Parsons expected, though he says he didn’t really expect anything. Parsons just wanted to study rats—common culprits in food contamination, disease spread, and gnawed-wire fires—but it wasn’t easy. Finding a site willing to host his research into “socially phenotyping” rats, effectively a cultural study of an animal almost universally seen as vermin, took more than a year of rejection. “I cried more than once,” he says. “Can I catch and release a rat on your property? There’s nothing good that can come out of that.” He was finally able to set up shop in the Greenpoint facility, where the dust falls so heavily that it “almost looks like it’s snowing inside the building,” in fall 2017, and began rat pheromone–based experiments in December.

The researchers think the pheromones and trapped rats attracted cats, and Parsons assumed that his research into rodent society would be doomed by the unwelcome intrusion. “This is just another headache,” he thought at the time, but he decided to lean in. “Let’s publish the headache.”

The team continued with their plan to trap rats and tag them with microchips, which helped the researchers track behavioral…

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